Favorite comments this week: layers of incredibly useful

So many layers of usefulness! By: Kat Kellner – CC BY 2.0
Oh my sweet little bitches, we have made it through the first week of the year! Here at the Empire this means that wedding seasons has kicked off with a BANG, and Offbeat Bride is seeing a big increase in traffic as summer brides start planning their weddings. But everyone's getting back to business across all the sites, which means lots of wonderful comments from y'all, our beloved Offbeatlings. Let's take a gander at some of our favorites this week!

Offbeat Bride

This incredibly useful comment from Cassie came in on this already incredibly useful post about booking blocks of hotel rooms, basically creating a perfect-storm of incredibly useful usefulness:

Another MAJOR tip: Make sure everyone's names match their room and EVERY SINGLE PERSON keeps their photo id on them. Seriously.

I cannot tell you how many people I have refused to make keys for because they didn't have their id and/or their name wasn't on their room. I know that bridesmaids rarely have a place for their id and they get MAD if you refuse to give them a key to their room.

Offbeat Bride: layering so many layers of incredibly useful on top of incredibly useful that you're making an incredibly useful cake of usefulness!

Offbeat Home & Life

The big news here, of course, was that Offbeat Home has rebranded to become Offbeat Home & Life. This means the site is expanding to include more non-decor content like Relationships, Budget & Career, and Style. To celebrate this rebrand, I thought I'd share two of these very much LIFE-related comments:

My fiance and I have one open aspect of our relationship – kissing. We can kiss whomever we darn well please, and it's great for our relationship in two big ways. First, it allows us to satisfy our curiosity about other people. Just because we're in a relationship doesn't mean we aren't attracted to other people, and with the open kissing rule we don't have to sit there wondering if Bob or Jill are good kissers, because we can just go find out. Forbidden fruit sometimes looks much better than it tastes. And second, it lets us go out and flirt (with intent, even!), and come back feeling sexier for it. There's nothing more empowering than realizing you could probably have 10 people at the party, but you choose ONE. It means we both know we're not being settled for – we're being chosen. And that's amazing.

People may pressure you to consider money and time spent on a previous career as a waste. Challenge that assumption! You can say things like, "Well, I'm changing direction now, but I know that I picked up skills X, Y and Z in that time, I met the amazing people A, B, and C who are now my life-long friends, and I feel really proud thinking back on how many animals and families I helped in that time. I'm choosing not to carry on doing that work, but that doesn't cancel out all the good I did before!"

Offbeat Families

Over on Offbeat Families, we had a post about how one woman dealt with her teenager being shunned by a friends' mother. While the post was framed pretty positively around what the author learned, there was still a tendency in the comments to blame the other mother. I extra appreciated this compassionate perspective, offered by Lina:

I know its hard but its important to not take others reactions personally because you never know where it comes from … At the end of the day, whether you agree with the method or not, this mother was just doing what she believed to be best for her daughter… I don't believe we have a right to judge her for that.

Amen, Lina. AMEN.

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Wait a second… after reading the lengthy comments at the post
"What's in store for Offbeat Home this year" it just occurred to me: How does OffbeatEmpire.com support itself? It must have the least traffic, right? Just curious!

Oh, offbeatempire.com is a totally different game — it's a public relations/community management endeavor, so its return on investment isn't measured in advertising profits or affiliate revenue. It's measured in stuff like speaking engagements, interview requests from journalists, and community engagement.

(That's also part of why offbeatempire.com sometimes has as many posts in a MONTH as offbeatbride.com has in a day.)

Dang, I love this place. Finding a community of upbeat, upward thinking, compassionate people with a no tolerance policy for BS has been such a blessing! I won't put up with judgey, shamey, meany-weaney nonsense irl and I won't do it in my beloved internetspace. Thank you Ariellllllllllllllll<3
And can I say thank you for "that doesn't cancel out the good I did before"? maybe my art degree will get greasy when I'm working on cars and maybe my perfect gingham home will suffer from the scooter parts in the sink but so what, if i hadnt developed as an artist i wouldnt want to make art cars and rebuild scooters. *breath* /rant whoa, unexpected trigger.

So chuffed to see my comment featured – and you're welcome! I've actually been struggling with some career-related stuff recently too, but looking at it from this perspective has helped me. Have submitted a post to OBH+L, so hopefully there will be some more helpful discussion along the same lines soon.

We want to help our readers find ways to express their truest, most authentic, badass selves. We aim to be inclusive and intelligent, while also keeping a sense of humor about ourselves and the world. We're all about supporting smarties worldwide as they navigate the big life transitions that are steeped in responsibility and expectation.